Data-Story to the Olympic Medal-History
Dashboard for the DVIZ course
Abstract
This Documents shows the history of the medals in the olympics and shows if hosting the olympics helps to get more medals.
Reading the Data
The Source of the Data can be found on Kaggle. There are two Datasets I used, one for the historic values and one for the 2021 Olympics in Tokio
To get the Data into the correct Format, i had to rename the Countries so the are consistent across the two data-sources.
And I had to rename the Host-Column, because normally, the city was the host, but i was just interested in the host-nation.
Source of the paralympics data, see: China at the Paralympics.
Visuals
Paralympic-Medals by China
China does not have a big history in the Winter-Games of the Paralympics. They participated in 2002 for the first time. But it wasn’t meant for them until 2018 when they won their first medal (From 26 Athletes). 4 Years later they hosted the Winter-Paralympics for the first time and they have achieved an incredible amount of 61 Medals, from which 23 were Gold Medals (from 76 Athletes), which put them of top of the Medal-Table.
2021 Olympics in Tokio, Japan
This incredible increase in Medals got me thinking. If these 61 Medals are caused by the amount of pride to represent their homecountry or any other political or category-doping (starting in the wrong category which leads to being physically less restricted than the other athletes) related Reason, does not really matter for me. I wanted to see, if hosting the olympics actually helps you winning more medals than on average.
So for that I made a Chart, in which you can see. that Japan got in their home-olympics 58 Medals, which put the in 5th position overall. But that does not really help us, because we have no comparison to the other years.
Comparison to non-hosting-Years
To see how well the countries have done in their hame compared to being away from home, we take the Top 15 Nations of all time and show all their Years and highlight the Years when they were hosting and the overall average.
While in Japan it is not that clearly visible, overall you can see a clear trend, that the hosting Years are mostly above the average, with just 2 exceptions. While the one in Sweden can be ignored, because the Olympics 1956 were held in Melbourne and just the Sports with horses were held in Stockholm, so only these Medals do count here as “Host-Medals”.